Happy and Glorious?

The BBC's home editor Mark Easton has a fascinating post on his blog exploring the regional relationship between two sets of government data: the recent survey on levels of well-being around the country are compared with regional rates of prescribing of anti-depressants. He finds that there are significant regional variations in the rate of prescription of anti-depressants, as well as interesting relatonships with the self-stated happiness of local populations.

Easton writes that 'Blackpool is the place with the highest use of antidepressants in England - an astonishing 1,430 prescriptions signed for every thousand patients in the primary care trust. The PCT issued 221,000 items with 155,000 people on its books.Blackpool also emerged as England's unhappiest place in last week's well-being survey data, with 36% of adult residents giving a score of 6/10 or less when asked to rate how happy they were the day before.'

The top six places in the league of anti-depressant use are all in the North-East where some of the country's most unhappy people are also to be found. By contrast, as the map shows, rates of prescribing are much lower in London, in areas that also suffer high levels of deprivation. Such correlations are always difficult to interpret, but suggest that the message about the importance of talking therapies is influential, perhaps appropriate, where the chattering classes predominate.


As well as these relationships in the data, the absolute levels of prescriptions for these mind-altering drugs are truly disturbing. More than £270m was spent on anti-depressants last year, up 23% from the previous year. This is a trend that has continued for the past tend years, with numbers of prescriptions growing from 9 million in 2001 to 24.3 million in 2001 and 46.7 million last year. The information we do not have is about how many individuals are involved, since these are numbers of prescriptions, but given the the number of prescriptions written annually for anti-depressants is now about the same as the number of adults in the country, we can assume that a massive proportion of our fellow citizens are not in their right minds.

Once there was great concern amongst science fiction writers about the threat of mass medication: governments adding to water supplies large quantities of chemicals that made populations docile and passive. This would undermine citizens' ability to demonstrate political opposition, and also make them accept policies of injustice or oppression. To what extent can we suggest that the mass prescription of these drugs is already a form of such mass medication? Are levels of disempowerment, frustration and despair leading to a more voluntary version of the same threat? And why is there so little outcry from citizens in response to such blatant evidence of social failure?
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I Can't Get No Satisfaction

You may have noticed a similarity between the last few posts, which are focusing on the failure of aggregate demand in our economy, and strategies for addressing this. Last time around the strategies focused on throwing money into the economy, reducing the quality of products, and, perhaps the strategy that has been most successful, changing the social hierarchy so that it relies on consumption rather than moral quality or personal charm.

The origins and techniques of the advertising industry as it developed in the US from the 1920s onwards is entertainingly discussed in Adam Curtis's TV series The Century of the Self. The critique began much earlier, with the publication in 1957 of Vance Packard's book The Hidden Persuaders. Packard blew the whistle on how scientific developments in psychology were being used to manipulate US citizens to undertake mass consumption. What he called the ‘depth approach’ to advertising was based on insights from social psychology. It was, as he described it, ‘impelled by the difficulties the marketers kept encountering in trying to persuade people to buy all the products their companies could fabricate’ (p. 17).

Packard expressed horror at what he called the marketing to ‘eight hidden needs’ which he identified as emotional security, reassurance of worth, ego-gratification, creative outlets, love objects, a sense of power, a sense of roots, and immortality. Although his work is now more than 50 years old, the routes advertising finds to exploit our psychological needs appear not to be. This use of scientific methods to uncover our inner needs and then to design products to meet them resulted in what Packard referred to as ‘the packaged soul’.

The focus of this activity was not the satisfaction of citizen-consumers; quite the reverse. To maintain levels of demand sufficient to avoid a slump it was essential that people consumed things they didn't need, and that what they bought rather than satisfying them, created desires for further purchasing. This helps to explain the paradox of growth as explored by Richard Douthwaite: that once societies reach a certain level of human development further growth can reduce rather than increasing happiness.
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The Happiness Crusade

The demonstration I was on yesterday in Cardiff was so much fun it went on all night. If you are a tweeter you can support the protest by sending a message of support. The demonstration was lively, noisy and made up of a mixed bag of students and schoolkids, leavened with a mix of Marxists, socialist workers and Greens. We were already well into chanting when the younger students arrived in their own march to great cheers - what somebody on the Twitter feed has called 'the children's crusade'.



Protesting is turning out to be so much fun that it makes me wonder whether this is part of Cameron's reason for beginning to measure happiness since, as the graphic shows, close social connections make people happier than money, once their basic needs are met (thanks to nef for the graphic, and their leading research in this area). Labour's creation of the disturbingly oxymoronic position of Happiness Tsar has been taken up by the Condems who have instructed their national statistician to begin a programme of scientific measurement of how jolly we all are.

Unlike in Bhutan, however, happiness is not to become the focus of policy-making, merely an adjunct to the measure of economic growth which is, as the PM will tell us later today, the real source of all our aspirations. If Richard Douthwaite was right in his seminal book The Growth Illusion in establishing that, beyond a certain point, growth actually detracts from our happiness, then this is a circle that simply cannot be squared. Instead we need to be developing policies for the post-growth world, as in the recent example of participatory policy development at the Leeds Steady State Economy conference, whose report was recently published.
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Growth or Balance? Cowboy or Spaceman?

The major objective of the economy as it works now is to grow, and the more it grows the happier the politicians are. Green economists would have more sympathy with the view of the radical US environmentalist Edward Abbey that ‘Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell’. In the capitalist ideology it does not matter that economic growth is destructive and does not increase human well-being; it only matters that there is more money changing hands in the global market. There is too much emphasis on standard of living, usually measured in purely material terms, and not enough on quality of life.

For green economists growth is the major problem, not only because it is usually bought at the expense of the planet, but also because it is actually reducing our quality of life. The lifestyles we expect in the 21st century have caused the extinction of species on a massive scale, and by causing climate change are actually threatening our future as a species. Yet they have not even improved our lives. Richard Douthwaite makes this case forcefully in his book, The Growth Illusion. He gives many examples of ways in which economic growth has reduced our quality of life. Technology has reduced skill in work, lowered wage levels, and increased stress. Increased production has generated pollution and inequality, themselves the cause of physical and mental disease. Communities and personal relationships have been undermined by intensified patterns of work.

Other research has shown that economic growth does not increase well-being or happiness, as illustrated in the figure in the case of the USA, which is the most advanced capitalist economy in the world with the highest levels of consumption, and yet the data shows that since the early 1960s rates of happiness have been falling, while rates of psychological illness have been increasing. The figure shows rates of happiness decline in the UK since 1946 as consumption levels rise inexorably (from a lecture by Richard Layard at the LSE).

This has been shown again by a study which measured increases in anxiety levels among American young adults and children between 1952 and 1993. Anxiety levels rose steadily during that time, to such an extent that the average level of a normal child today is the same as that which was found in children who had been sent for psychiatric treatment in the 1950s.

Green economics proposes a move away from a focus on economic growth and towards a ‘steady-state economy’, which is the only type of economy that can be sustainable in the long term. In the steady-state economy, the planetary frontier is respected and the earth is therefore the most scarce resource. This leads us to conclude that we should use it as wisely as possible, maximising its productivity while at the same time minimising our use of it. We should therefore focus more on quality and less on quantity.

In order to achieve the steady state we need to pay attention both to the number of people who are sharing the earth’s resources, and also their level of consumption. We should also be aware of the regenerative capacity of the planet, our only basic resource, so that non-renewable resources should not be removed at a rate faster than renewable substitutes can be developed, and our outputs of waste, including pollution, should be limited to the level where they do not exceed the planet’s carrying capacity.

The issue of resources is crucial. Economics is defined as the study of how resources are or should be distributed. Green economics suggests a whole change of perspective on our attitude to resource use, one that can be portrayed as a shift from the perspective of the cowboy to the perspective of the spaceman. The cowboy views his world as infinite and lives without a frontier in an environment where there are endless resources to meet his needs and a vast empty area to absorb his wastes. The attitude of the spaceman could not be more different. He is aware that his environment is very limited indeed. He only has available the resources that can be fitted into his small capsule, and he is only too familiar with his own wastes.

Green economists suggest that we need to leave behind the attitude of the cowboy and move towards that of the spaceman. Nowhere is this more necessary than in the world of business, where the gunslinger stills rules supreme but where viewing the earth as our only available spaceship would be a better guarantee of our survival as a species:

A businessman would not consider a firm to have solved its problem of production and to have achieved viability if he saw that it was rapidly consuming its capital. How, then, could we overlook this vital fact when it comes to that very big firm, the economy of Spaceship Earth and, in particular, the economies of its rich passengers? (Schumacher, 1973: 12). Tweet